


Teach The Children Well

by Zahri



Category: Cyclone Series - Courtney Milan
Genre: Adam Fucking Reynolds' Language, Cyclone Nightcare, Gen, Junior Hacker Central, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-18 15:01:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18701950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zahri/pseuds/Zahri
Summary: Adam Reynolds just wanted to stay home with his kid. While running Cyclone.So yes, Blake grew up at Cyclone. So did a lot of other kids. They called it Nightcare.





	Teach The Children Well

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rmc28](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rmc28/gifts), [vass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/gifts).



It starts out with Blake as an infant. The late nights leading up to product launches were not conducive to being able to spend the evening at home with a baby, and when Adam tried that (he wanted to be a good father), he found himself dropping everything and rushing back to the office as soon as Blake was asleep. Penny was willing to have Blake stay over occasionally, but it wasn't a permanent solution, and Adam refused to hire a night nanny so his kid could live without his parent ever needing to be nearby.  
   
Why did I go through all of this to have a kid if I never fucking see him? What bullshit!  
   
So they tuck a pack n play into a spare nook between Adam and Peter's offices, (previously the domain of an outdated printer), turn the bottom of a filing cabinet into a toy drawer, and set up a bottle warmer in the nearby kitchenette. Adam would call if he wasn't going to make it home until after dinner, Blake's nanny would drop him off at the offices at 7pm as she headed home, washed and in his pyjamas, and Adam would stop working to play with his kid. Peter would find himself reading bedtime stories to a sleepy baby, some of which occasionally turned out to be recent financial reports when Blake was colicky and just wanted to be held.  
   
Nobody says anything, but after a week or two a constellation of glow in the dark stars appeared over the ceiling, a poster from Batman the Animated Series was stuck to the wall, and both a stuffed Ewok and a plush Enterprise had been tucked into the pack n play. Cyclone's staff clearly had Views about proper child indoctrination.  
   
Adam catches George sneaking a rainbow apple stuffie into the crib. "What is this bullshit, George? How did you even get promotional material for those cocksucking bastards into the building without security noticing? No!"

By the time Blake starts to walk, the sight of a giggling toddler careening down the hall in a dinosaur onesie at 10pm at night or lying on his stomach in a boardroom playing with a shape sorter is a familiar one. More than one employee would simply turn him around to send him back to bed. He's their mascot, after all, but even mascots need their sleep.

* * *

By the time Blake is three, Cyclone has a childcare sitter on call for evenings and a spare boardroom has been fitted out with half a dozen single beds that are used for naps by engineers during the day and by kids in the evenings. You can tell major Cyclone deadlines are coming up by the number of children sprawled on beanbags in front of a projector screen in a conference room, or busy drawing on the back of old dot-matrix continuous paper sheets.

The kids eat a lot of Chinese, pizza, mac and cheese and microwaved chicken nuggets.

Sai suggests the next move might be making sure there's an onsite cafeteria that can handle proper dinner time meals if they're going to have kids around all the time. With a dietitian looking over the menus. It’s not just the kids at risk of scurvy. 

* * *

By 1998 Cyclone was on a massive push for a new operating system. Y2K had finally hit the media hard, and companies they had service contracts with were panicking at them to ensure that their computers weren't about to explode.

Everyone was working long hours, and none of the local childcare centers were open after 7pm.

What the hell sort of policy is that? 

The Nightcare program expanded beyond "we don't care if you bring the kids in if you need to" to a full time evening childcare service. Cyclone's now dealing with the accreditation to officially run it on premises. It's a goddamn selling point while trying to steal senior staff from other companies.

And for the next 18 months, there are at least a dozen kids coming in every day after school.

They have their own dedicated computer lab. After a while some of the engineers started putting tech that was still under development in there, as the kids managed to find bugs and break things in ever more creative ways.

Peter ends up starting the bug-bounty program for the kids after the occasion when Urmilla’s youngest, just 3, managed to accidentally reconfigure one of the computers to repeatedly dial the internet, rotating through a half dozen assigned IPs, and the attempts to stop it eventually led to a cascading operating system crash that took out all the computers on that wall.

That level of tech savant skill in destroying systems ought to be rewarded, after all. 

* * *

Red Team/Blue Team actually started with Pokemon. Within 3 weeks of the first kid getting the game, the room was split over whether Red was better than Blue and there were complex negotiations over trading Pokemon to each other and running battles. 

A number of parents acquired GameBoys for even their smallest Nightcare sprogs in that period, because there is only so many times you can hear the names of various Pokemon chanted at you by a desperately excited 5 year old. Plus, this had the frisson of being a _new franchise_ , and what self-respecting parent doesn’t want to get their kid in on the ground floor of a burgeoning playground craze? They’d get to be the cool kids! (The amount of self-projection in this over childhood regrets is left to the reader).

Of course, once your children have divided into fanatically devoted camps declaring themselves Red and Blue, it just seems easier to use that split when teaching the kids programming skills. The lessons they were getting at school were long on LOGO black turtles and short on programming languages actually used at Cyclone.

And there are more than a few parents convinced that their children will have an easier time learning to code properly if they learn language fluency while their brains are still young and elastic. Adam’s not alone in this. Blake’s head start happened to include getting his nappy changes commentated in script markup every step of the way, but he’s not the only one getting shown coding tricks and getting given typing homework.

It’s less “seminars” than “various employees dropping by the Nightcare computer lab to show off a few tricks on their break”. Which develops into “fielding questions and troubleshooting”.

Okay, it becomes “seminars”. In a few years, the kids are the ones teaching them to the befuddled new employees sent down there by their managers for some remedial education after making a particularly big fuckup.

* * *

The kids eventually figure out how to get in the back door to the unofficial intranet server that hosts the music, movie and computer game collections, maintained locally because passing the tapes is a time-honored tradition.

This is detected fairly quickly, because ten very excited primary schoolers gathered around a computer watching Princess Mononoke and squealing is rather obvious, especially when there wasn’t a videotape or a DVD of it in the Nightcare collection.

The access path to the server is changed.

The kids get back in, and this time start installing Leisure Suit Larry, from a misguided conviction that it’ll be just as fun as other Sierra games they have access to, like Ecoquest or King’s Quest.

They’re caught, game is deleted and the computer set up to defrag to remove all traces of the inappropriately-rated material. (At least three children drag in beanbags and laze around watching the manual defrag graphics on the screen, claiming it’s ‘relaxing’).

The access to the server is changed, again.

Peter suggests setting up private servers with child-appropriate material for the Nightcare kids to practice accessing, if this is going to keep happening. They didn’t need to beta-test ALL systems. He partitions the content between the two servers, giving custody of one server to Blake and the other to Kenji. After all, it’s good practice for them.

Team-directed attempts to break into the other server begin immediately.

* * *

The kids all end up super close, like an extended family, after spending so much time together.

And like any extended family, they know exactly how to get on each others’ nerves. The unofficial background accompaniment to any serious Capture the Flag games is Jurassic Park. This is for two reasons:

1\. It is guaranteed to make the entire room turn around and scream “hacking doesn’t work that way” during That Scene. The best time to sneak something past the other team is to get it activate at that very moment.

2\. It always throws Anj off her game, as she feels the need to commentate and complain through all of the inaccuracies in the movie.

Once, Blake managed to sneak a virus onto her computer that filled the screen with a pixelated green t-rex, with a word-perfect version of her standard comments appearing in the white space next to the dinosaur in Courier New. It was synced to the movie. It was PERFECT.

Anj chased Blake all the way down to the cafeteria before tackling him to the ground for that one. But hah – his team still won that match.

**Author's Note:**

> This has continued to pop up in people's Yuletide requests. And still hasn't been written. So I got sick of dreaming about a decent version of this story, and wrote this instead.


End file.
